The Typographic Medium
by Kate Brideau
MIT Press, 2021, 304pp
Most people have agonized over a font choice at some point—for a PowerPoint presentation, a website’s hero section, or a PhD thesis1. Even if we can’t articulate why one option feels right and another doesn’t, it all feels very important! These feelings are not new.
In the 18th century, debates raged over Caslon and Baskerville (the latter derived from the former). Benjamin Franklin, an advocate of Baskerville, once tore off a piece of paper and asked a proponent of Caslon to point out the flaws in Baskerville. Easy enough: Lines too thin! Letters of unnatural proportions! Too painful to read! Only to realize moments later that he’d been critiquing Caslon all along.
The story, apparently a staple in typography texts2, raises interesting questions. What makes up a typeface? What makes them distinct? How do they influence us? Kate Brideau takes all of these up in The Typographic Medium—though the book’s central argument eluded me.
The book is full of fascinating detail: the lack of copyright protections for typefaces3, how language scripts shape typographic design4, the competing demands of form and function5, and so much more. The focus on the word “medium” throughout the book implies something fundamental—yet I couldn’t grasp what that is, or what makes it unique to typography rather than applicable to music, architecture, or engineering. I’d have trouble summarizing the book’s thesis to someone else, though I could happily list the things I learned. If you’re interested in typography, you’ll learn a great deal from it too.
It’s $\text{\small{Computer Modern}}$! ↩︎
I guess every field has its essential anecdote or principle—something interesting enough to hook a layman. When I was in hardware engineering, one always had to mention Moore’s Law in every paper and presentation. ↩︎
In the US, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright; however, the computer code that produces the vector outlines may be protected. ↩︎
An interesting example is Han unification, an attempt by the authors of Unicode to map the character sets of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean onto a single set of characters—an understandable thing to do given the size of each set! ↩︎
In the 1970s, West Germany realized that the standard typeface used for car plates was incredibly easy to modify, e.g., one could easily turn a ‘P’ into an ‘R’ with some black tape, and it was becoming a problem. FE-Schrift typeface was designed to make such modifications much more difficult. ↩︎